'If any man build upon this foundation gold, silver, precious stones,
wood, hay, stubble.' In the original application of the metaphor,
Paul is thinking of all these teachers in that church at Corinth as
being engaged in building the one structure--I venture to deflect
here, and to regard each of us as rearing our own structure of life
and character on the foundation of the preached and accepted Christ.
Now, what the Apostle says is that these builders were, some of them,
laying valuable things like gold and silver and costly stones--by
which he does not mean jewels, but marbles, alabasters, polished
porphyry or granite, and the like; sumptuous building materials,
which were employed in great palaces or temples--and that some of
them were bringing timber, hay, stubble, reeds gathered from the
marshes or the like, and filling in with such trash as that. That is
a picture of what a great many Christian people are doing in their
own lives--the same man building one course of squared and solid and
precious stones, and topping them with rubbish. You will see in the
walls of Jerusalem, at the base, five or six courses of those massive
blocks which are the wonders of the world yet; well jointed, well
laid, well cemented, and then on the top of them a mass of poor
stuff, heaped together anyhow; scamped work--may I use a modern
vulgarism?--'jerry-building.' You may go to some modern village, on
an ancient historic site, and you will find built into the mud walls
of the hovels in which the people are living, a marble slab with fair
carving on it, or the drum of a great column of veined marble, and on
the top of that, timber and clay mixed together.
That is the type of the sort of life that hosts of Christian people
are living. For, mark, all the builders are on the foundation. Paul
is not speaking about mere professed Christians who had no faith at
all in them, and no real union with Jesus Christ. These builders were
'on the foundation'; they were building on the foundation, there was
a principle deep down in their lives--which really lay at the bottom
of their lives--and yet had not come to such dominating power as to
mould and purify and make harmonious with itself the life that was
reared upon it. We all know that that is the condition of many men,
that they have what really are the fundamental bases of their lives,
in belief and aim and direction; and which yet are not strong enough
to master the whole of the life, and to manifest themselves through
it. Especially it is the condition of some Christian people. They
have a real faith, but it is of the feeblest and most rudimentary
kind. They are on the foundation, but their lives are interlaced with
the most heterogeneous mixty-maxty of good and evil, of lofty, high,
self-sacrificing thoughts and heavenward aspirations, of resolutions
never carried out into practice; and side by side with these there
shall be meannesses, selfishnesses, tempers, dispositions all
contradictory of the former impulses. One moment they are all fire
and love, the next moment ice and selfishness. One day they are all
for God, the next day all for the world, the flesh, and the devil.
Jacob sees the open heavens and the face of God and vows; to-morrow
he meets Laban and drops to shifty ways. Peter leaves all and follows
his Master, and in a little while the fervour has gone, and the fire
has died down into grey ashes, and a flippant servant-girl's tongue
leads him to say 'I know not the man.' 'Gold, silver, precious
stones,' and topping them, 'wood, hay, stubble!'
The inconsistencies of the Christian life are what my text, in the
application that I am venturing to make of it, suggests to us. Ah,
dear friends! we do not need to go to Jacob and Peter; let us look at
our own hearts, and if we will honestly examine one day of our lives,
I think we shall understand how it is possible for a man, on the
foundation, yet to build upon it these worthless and combustible
things, 'wood, hay, stubble.'
We are not to suppose that one man builds _only_ 'gold, silver,
precious stones.' There is none of us that does that. And we are not
to suppose that any man who _is_ on the foundations has so little
grasp of it, as that he builds _only_ 'wood, hay, stubble.'
There is none of us who has not intermingled his building, and there
is none of us, if we are Christians at all, who has not sometimes
laid a course of 'precious stones.' If your faith is doing _nothing_
for you except bringing to you a belief that you are not going to
hell when you die, then it is no faith at all. 'Faith without works
is dead.' So there is a mingling in the best, and--thank God!--there
is a mingling of good with evil, in the worst of real Christian
people.